Day Zero Diagnostics, Inc

Current methods of infectious diseases diagnosis and treatment are antiquated and increasingly ineffective due to the rise of antibiotic resistance. Today, when a patient shows up at a hospital with a suspected infection, samples are collected and sent to the lab where they are smeared onto petri dishes to see if they grow. It is only after they are cultured that bacteria can be tested for drug resistance. This antiquated process takes 3-5 days, or longer and every hour that a patient goes untreated, their risk of death and complications increases. With little information to go on, physicians are forced to treat with empiric therapy: powerful, broad-spectrum antibiotics that are expensive, have significant toxicity, and are increasingly less effective due to the growth in drug resistant pathogens. In fact, the use of empiric therapy as the standard treatment approach has contributed to the growing epidemic of resistance. At DZD, we are developing a molecular diagnostic that uses high throughput sequencing and computational techniques to identify, within hours, both the species and the antibiotic resistance profile of a pathogen. We hope you will stay tuned to our progress.